Just a small recommendation for The Escapist News, when talking about how buggy a game is, try and post the buggy gameplay itself. I know that this is footage from trailers and I understand getting buggy footage will take effort, but at least it will your content look far more professional.

I suspect it comes down to being smart about money. Making add-ons that need work-arounds for major bugs... is expensive. The work-arounds will become new bugs when the originals get fixed so... really, it costs fewer man-hours. Except for those parts of production that can't be repurposed into bug-stomping. I mean, the art guys and voice actors are either exempt... or thumb-twiddling. Although, if the game itself tanks, they can't sell DLC for it... so they might be hedging their bets on sinking more money in, if they can't make it work fast enough, profitably enough.

I'm just giddy at the notion that suits will finally make a connection between quality product and keeping investors happy. For a little while. Maybe.

They've set themselves an impossible task considering DICE patches almost always introduce two new problems for each one they fix.

Not to mention all the focus on bugs and stability issues has meant there's been very little in the way of tweaking maps, modes or balancing weapons/vehicles which is what they SHOULD be doing by this stage.

I'm actually confused why they are even bothering to fix it when EA will be canabilising it anyway once Titanfall releases.

This is a joke, right? Everybody's taking it completely seriously but it seriously sounds like an April Fool's day article.

The phrase "Crashing from too many friends" is what sealed it for me. And hasn't BF4 already sold more copies than the bible? Yet their stock price is supposed to be going down because people are reporting bugs?

TheMadDoctorsCat:This is a joke, right? Everybody's taking it completely seriously but it seriously sounds like an April Fool's day article.

The phrase "Crashing from too many friends" is what sealed it for me. And hasn't BF4 already sold more copies than the bible? Yet their stock price is supposed to be going down because people are reporting bugs?

Yeah but the difference is that the Microsoft products are at least usable. There's also something called brand loyalty. Why do you think iPhones sell fuck tons every year? If you have a bad experience with that product then you won't buy from that company anymore. Bad reputation can drop stock prices.

I feel like I've been ripped off.Even though I regret buying Ghosts they somehow work a lot better than BF4. No freezes, no crashes, no disconnections... Wish it was a better game instead of just better working game though. >_>

Didn't buy Premium because I knew this would happen. I love Battlefield to death, but I haven't even touched BF4 in weeks. All my friends moved back to 3, and we're not going back until they finally get it running properly. There's nothing more infuriating than crashing in the middle of a match, losing most of your unlocks and XP in the process. I can deal with a glitch or two, but these crashes/drops just take away any fun. When the game works, it's glorious, but I can never just sit down and enjoy it, because I'm constantly nervous that it's going to crash again, and all my work of the last 20 minutes or so will have been for nothing.

It's a shame that EA is getting the red flag from the men in suits for doing the right thing - fixing the game lots of people have already paid for - instead of wringing more money out of players.

That said, with the type and amount of bugs in the game, one could think Dice doesn't know what they're doing, if it wasn't their 4th Battlefield. Still, I'm just glad I haven't bought it yet, and I won't until I stop hearing too many legit complaints from players.

exobook:Interesting that even investors are getting fed up with buggy games.

But its also interesting they mentioned that Star Wars battlefront development as been halted. EA was the upcoming battlefront just BF4 reskinned and rebalanced without any real modification?

More like Battlefront would have used the same engine. Makes sense, if the engine is bugged to crap and will need to be patched it doesn't make sense to develop based on the old unfixed one since you'd have to likely redevelop for the fixed engine.

My concern is, why did they not see this coming. I mean, they must have stress tested this yes? This game had a development budget that rivals the fiscal budget of some countries so they must have spent a little on proper testing right?

exobook:Interesting that even investors are getting fed up with buggy games.

But its also interesting they mentioned that Star Wars battlefront development as been halted. EA was the upcoming battlefront just BF4 reskinned and rebalanced without any real modification?

Maybe. I just think that both are being made by DICE and presumably it's all hands on deck to fix bf4. I haven't touched bf4 in a month. Next time, I'll wait that month before I buy the game in the first place.

So we agree to vote EA worst company this year as well right? Because the CEO had the balls to say "we want to be the most liked" while the company CONTINUES it's bullshit with releasing unfinished games and money-grabbing DLC practices.

And no, it wasn't a mistake that BF4 was released in such a bad state. Both EA and DICE knew the game was not ready and barely QA tested, EA simply skipped QA in order to beat CoD:Ghosts to release.

DICE is also partially to blame for having such an ambitious project but failing to meet their deadline, and also for being EA's obedient bitches instead of saying "no EA we need more time, the game is not fucking ready".

I've played every PC battlefield game since the original 1942, each a lot. I figured it would be a sound investment, given that history, to do a premium preorder (via Origin, too, feeling dirty about it).

How do you figure I feel? Like a bloody chump.

There's an amazingly fun game there, I keep glimpsing, as I've played maybe 14 hours of incomplete matches in between the inevitable, unfixable, full-freeze directx crashes*** that require a cold 'power off' shut-down that's caused other persistent system instability that's required attention.

I got frustrated to the point I just stopped playing altogether. I'll test the waters again when the pool seems less prone to diarrhea geysers. -____-

***(unique to BF4; never seen by any of some 140 steam / gog / other games including glitchy resource hogs like Rome 2 and Metro Last Light)

@Yuuki: In that case, it's deserved, but still a shame that Dice allowed this to happen. One would think they're in a position to say 'no' to EA. They've built Frostbite, after all. The engine that's supposed to be used by all in-house studios.